Shipping container horror: Girl found bound and gagged after months of torture

Police described it as ‘the most horrific thing’ they’ve seen.
- byNew Idea

Sep
2016

Police officers described it as ‘the most horrific thing’ they’ve seen, and Nikitah Beadman is still suffering the effects of torture at the hands of her ex-boyfriend.

Sergeants Peter Venz and Danny Rehe discovered Beadman bound and gagged in shipping container on a Queensland property where her boyfriend Robert Galleghan tortured her.

'When the doors opened we’ve seen the trolley, like a fridge loading trolley, and we could see a body strapped to it,' Sgt Rehe told A Current Affair on Tuesday night.

'That’s when we went inside and probably saw the most horrific thing we’ve seen. My heart actually sank ... It was evil and depraved what I saw.

‘She had a blue yoga mat strapped around her head with wire and she was wired all the way down the shopping trolley. The wire was so tight it was just cutting into her skin.

'The first thing I did was kneel down, because there was nothing I could do, but was to hold her hand and tell her I was there and that we were trying to help, and reassure her and calm her. That was all I could do.'

Sgt Venz added: ‘What sort of person leaves someone that they’re supposed to love strapped to a trolley, in a shipping container, down the back of the house in the bush, and go off to the police station to make a complaint knowing damn well that she’s probably going to die in that shipping container?’

Beadman was discovered in November 2012 and four years later is still recovering from her injuries.

'I have got a lot of injuries still now,' she said.

'I have got a twisted backbone and two rotated ribs, that in any sort of movement or any sort of exercise could pierce one of my lungs; I have got multiple sprains all through my back; I have got sciatic nerve damage; I have also got nerve damage in my right arm, that I still couldn't use for a year-and-a-half after - which was from the wire.'